Life writing is an opportunity to enjoy all the events and people of your life in a new and likely even more interesting way.

Why?

Now you have something delicious called perspective, and a wealth of experience that enables you to fully grasp the significance of what you’ve been through, you’ll see what you learned and how important that learning is. You’ll recognize those beautiful serendipitous coincidences that brought you to the right place at the right time, and introduced you to valued friends, partners and opportunities.

You’ll see the bigger picture and what could be more life affirming than that?  You will begin to see the meaning of some of what has come into your life, be able to acknowledge the connections, the themes and the importance of those in your life.

Once you have the main people, events and memories noted, you can begin the process of crafting your story to share with loved ones.

I’m creating a Memory Workbook to help you sketch the important bits, and to help spark your memories. I’ll be releasing it in the next few weeks. In the meantime, get yourself a notebook, find a comfortable pen, and start jotting down things you remember. Make a list, it doesn’t have to be more complicated than that.

Let me know how it’s going in the comments.

As you spend time reflecting on your life for your life writing or memoir project, you will encounter regrets. Roads not taken, friendships not maintained, doubts about your responses to difficulties or opportunities. It goes with the territory. No life lived fully can be entirely without regrets.

What do we do with or about such regrets? Ignore them? Tell ourselves to get over it? That doesn’t work all that well. We need to face our regrets, without guilt, self-blame, shame, or anything except simple curiosity.

Regrets are often made up of ‘what ifs’ and ‘if onlys’, which are rarely realistic. Most of us tend to forget that we did the best we knew how at the time, with the knowledge, resources, emotional maturity and courage we possessed then. Yes, maybe that’s all different now, you’re older, have more experience, and greater courage to bring to bear on your life today. But then, in the past, you had what you had then, not what you have now.

It is far kinder and more realistic to honour who you were then instead of listing all the things you should have been able to see, know or do. Seems to me the ‘shoulds’ always spell trouble.

Some regrets we can actually do something about. Maybe you regret not finishing your education. Once you acknowledge that for whatever reasons it wasn’t the right time for that, you could explore taking courses to complete that program or degree.  Or you regret that you lost touch with a particular friend when life took you in a different direction–look her up, it’s easy enough with the internet.

There are regrets from childhood too. If you wanted to learn a musical instrument or to sing but the family story was that your sister had more talent and even if she had no interest, she was given lessons. Nothing prevents you from signing up for piano or voice lessons now.

Perhaps you had a difficult childhood and there are still wounds that pain you, all these years later. Volunteer with a youth group, become an in-school mentor, be there for a youngster in a significant way (Big Brothers, Big Sisters) and those regrets and even the wounds soon fade.

Regrets that you don’t do anything about, whatever you choose to do that is meaningful for you, are a waste of your precious life energy. You have two choices when faced with your regrets: either do something about them, or let them go. Do whatever works best for you.

What regrets do you still have and how are you transforming them?

A family reunion is a memoir writer’s dream resource. This is primary research on a grand scale.

Imagine a collection of all the significant people in your extended family and their partners, wanting to get together simply to share stories. Okay, yes, they’ll want to party as well. You should probably consider going into marathon training before such an event to make sure you have the stamina required to cope with all the information, connections and stories you will encounter.

You will definitely want to prepare questions, and learn to use a video camera or tape recorder.  Scribble notes at the speed of light of who has what resources in terms of documents, photos or written materials you may want to consult.

If you are organizing such an event make sure there are story telling corners/venues where people can gather and share what they know. With permission, record these sessions.

If there isn’t already an extensive family tree, have a family tree roughed out on large poster board and encourage people to add missing names and dates to it.

Above all, connect with others in the group who are also writing personal or family memoirs, as there are sure to be several.

Do you have experience of a family reunion? How did you, or will you use what you learned in your own memoir?

A memoir can be anything that records your life. A written memoir is just one of many options.

Photographs, if you have a lot of them, supplemented by written stories is another method to capture your life memories. You can use your photos in an album with pages of text to accompany them or build a comprehensive and colourful scrap book using photos and images of significant artifacts you have saved.

Do you have ticket stubs from events you attended? Brochures of places you have visited? Lovely notes from friends, colleagues or clients? Anything you value can find a place in your memoir and will tell part of your life story.

One of my personal treasures is a small chapbook that I created in nursery school before I left Holland. I’m looking for an interesting way to use it to tell the story of the major life event of moving from Europe to Canada when I was five years old.

The story of that move, and all that it entailed are critical to who I grew up to be. It has a historical as well as personal context. My emigration was part of a larger picture of post-war emigration of Dutch citizens to Canada in the early 1950′s. There were also important family dynamics and issues to this move that continued to impact my life for many years.

Part of the story is also surely the visit to my beloved grandmother, 38 years later when I was on book tour, to honour the promise I made as a five year old to tell her about my life in Canada. Between these two events there are many stories and I can create a memoir using just these two life markers and filling in as much or as little as I like.

Do you have any linked life events that you can use to build your memoir? How will you go about it?

Sooner or later when writing a memoir, or even notes for a memoir, you’ll get to some tough bits. There are sorrows, hurtful experiences, damaging relationships and many other things that give pain in most lives. How are you going to deal with that?

You could of course choose to ignore these hurts and sorrows and move on. This is a strategy that may be useful in some contexts when you don’t have the supports you need, or the time for extended reflection to deal with these important things appropriately.

It doesn’t work to postpone the reflection indefinitely, but it makes good sense to have the back up and the time you need to address them.

And if the time to tackle the sorrows and tough bits is now, how do you do that safely and with caring for yourself?

There are some of us who just jump into the mess and try to get it all over with, like pulling a sticky bandage off quickly. This may occasionally work, but it certainly isn’t easy, and doesn’t necessarily make things go faster or with less pain. If you are attracted to this method, try it, see if it works for you, and if it doesn’t, consider another option.

Reflection on the pain and sorrows of one’s life, for whatever reason we do that, is a process and damn if process doesn’t have its own rules and take its own sweet time. Ask me how I know…

The main things we need to consider when we decide it is time to view some of life’s hurts and sorrows is–are we safe?  Do we have the supports we need for when it all feels too much to bear alone (friends we trust, a therapist perhaps)?

Do we in fact have a plan?

A plan?

Just as you can choose to look at the tough bits as part of a life review or memoir process, you can choose how you will go about that. Do you feel it would be easier to cope if you did this work (for it is work) when you have the house to yourself, a couple of hours a week? If you think that might work for you, then schedule it. Decide what hour(s) of the week you will devote to this reflection and writing.  At the end of the time, schedule another time and then walk away.

Simple, right?

No, of course not. Here is what tends to happen:

1. You honour the need to do the self reflection and look at the tough bits, and you feel good and even courageous about that.

2. You do not let the sorrow and muck take over your life, nor are you living the entire time of this reflection in the past.

3. You set clear boundaries.

4. You get it done.

A memoir can be about your whole life or any part of it you want to write about. Let’s look at a few starting points.

1. Start with a date. In 1975 a friend and I bought an abandoned white clapboard prairie church in a tiny village in Saskatchewan for $300. I’ve got a lot to say about that. It is a good starting point for the memoir of a 23 year period of my life. What is your most significant date?

2. Start with an experience. Is there an experience in your life that you continue to tell stories about, that draws you to look at it from many different angles? I had a friend who spent time in northern Ontario as a guard in a detention camp for Germans during the World War II and he told many, many stories about it. That would have been a good starting point for his memoir.

3. Start with an event. Where were you and what were you doing the day JFK was shot? What impact did Neil Armstrong’s space walk have on you–did you watch it on TV, with whom? What other major historical event became a marker in your life story? Start with that.

4. Start with a significant person, or mentor. We’ve all had people in our lives who made a huge difference. Was yours a high school teacher, a family friend, someone you met in odd circumstances you will never forget and that forever changed you? Start with that.

5. Start with a photograph. When I wrote my first memoir I used a collection of photographs I had which recorded aspects of my childhood. I sorted them by first collecting them in one place, then putting aside anything that caused an emotional response or ripple. That was a great starting point.

6. Start with a significant and persistent memory. Certain memories haunt us, because they are turning points in our development or a crossroads we have never forgotten. They make a good starting point, even if they aren’t all that positive, on the principle that it isn’t the cards you are dealt that are important, but what you do with them, and even more important, what you learn.

7. Start anywhere. Start with a conversation, an image from a magazine, anything that sets off a memory chain you can follow, or just start noodling in a notebook to see what comes to the surface.  The critical thing is to Start!

What method works for you?

When I tell people that my mission is to help folks write their personal stories, or memoirs, I almost always get a comment that goes something like, ‘my life is so ordinary that I’d have nothing to write’.

I beg to differ. I don’t believe there is such a thing as an ordinary life. There are in every life perhaps ordinary events, but that is not the same thing. My concern is that when someone says they have only an ordinary life, they mean either (best case) that it would seem dull to others; or (worst case) that it has no worth.

Many people get married, some more than once. Yet is every wedding the same, do all the guests behave with decorum, do all the important guests even show up? There are dozens upon dozens of stories unique to you, even in so-called ordinary life events. How did you feel on your wedding day? How did your parents or siblings react on the day? What odd things happened? Did the groom actually show up and on time?

My husband-to-be kept the wedding party waiting for 3 hours in a baking hot prairie church. No one knew what to do. One of my best friends fainted from the heat and broke her front tooth somehow. The rest of us merely whispered and sweltered. Nobody left the church. I actually married the guy, but it was 1965 and I was 18 so what did I know? No explanation was given when he finally arrived, but I have some pretty good notions of where he and my father were during that time.

So exactly what was ordinary about this ordinary life event? Well, we had a cake that was pretty ordinary.

Each of us has many stories about either our own wedding or weddings we have attended over the years. Why not list some of the more significant weddings in your life, then go through your list and mark any that you think were without any unique or remarkable events. I’d be surprised to hear you had any check marks on your list.

Do you still think everything about your life is ordinary?